


EKHISTANAI

by SILKCUT



Series: ɪɴꜱᴄʀɪʙᴇᴅ ʙʏ ꜱɪʟᴋᴄᴜᴛ [11]
Category: Sacred Games - Vikram Chandra, The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: Character Study, Crossover, Gen, Inscribed by SILKCUT, Twitter Roleplay Solo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-15 13:34:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29065146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SILKCUT/pseuds/SILKCUT
Summary: To Ganesh, she was an imaginary friend his mind conjured up two weeks ago during one of his baths. It could either be due to loneliness or madness, but whatever the case, he’s stuck with her now.
Relationships: Ganesh Gaitonde/Delirium of the Endless
Series: ɪɴꜱᴄʀɪʙᴇᴅ ʙʏ ꜱɪʟᴋᴄᴜᴛ [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2132040
Kudos: 1





	EKHISTANAI

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Ｇａｎｅｓｈ Ｅｋｎａｔｈ Ｇａｉｔｏｎｄｅ

**ﾒ**

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## ｅｋｈｉｓｔａｎａｉ

## 

##  **༻✧**

The engine coughed in agonizing bouts like a ward filled with tuberculosis patients. It was a grating sound that filled every crevice of the already tense silence inside the truck. One would think that such a secured vehicle which carried violent men inside would at least not have a shitty engine.  
  
But this is Bombay, at the heartland of Kailashpada, where even the most glamorous and untouchable of the privileged still has to scrape off the grimiest bits of poverty from the very shoes on their feet.  
  
Ganesh was at the nexus of this paradox, a living example of what this city—this gandu of a country—does to its most ambitious men.  
  
He sat across five of Suleiman Isa's boys, two of them in the midst of holding back a laugh at the sight of the rival don among their merry gang. They have, of course, heard of the rumors that the once great Ganesh Gaitonde has been neutered by Parulkar, the officer in charge of his captivity and eventual release.  
  
For forty-some odd nights, Parulkar and his men had him lay on his stomach as they beat him with sticks. These systematic blows targeted the soles of his feet. The skin on that area is the most sensitive part of the body, next only to the nail beds and navel.   
  
He couldn't walk for a whole month and had to be carted off to his cell or the toilet where he's separated from the other prisoners whilst he bathes and tries not to wince from the many other wounds on his stomach and back which haven’t healed then.  
  
It was a routine he got accustomed too soon enough, for one of Ganesh's greatest assets is his adaptability. In the mornings he would eat, wash and try to talk to his own boys from a block so far away from his own. He only ever got to successfully get in contact with them twice.   
  
Twice was enough to get him what he needed.  
  
And, at night, the extreme measures of torture played out.  
  
Inside the truck at present, one of Isa's men could not help himself and said, “So, Gaitonde-ji, I heard you have a beautiful voice whenever you sing for Parulkar-saab at night.”  
  
Ganesh said nothing as he kept his eyes downcast. He was the portrait of meekness, just a disgraced ganglord who was fed to the wolves and abandoned now here in this claustrophobic containment where his rival’s would-be assassins sit not even a foot away. His knees often bumped with theirs every time the truck would hit a curve on the road.  
  
“I heard,” another one chipped in, “…that you have a plump gaand, Gaitonde-ji. Plump as a fresh fruit that Parulkar rammed his dick into every night while you compose him a ballad!”  
  
They talked to him this way now because he was alone and there were five of them. These two are the most heavy built from their group, and so felt very confident to sling insults towards his way. Men of their bulk yet meandering intelligence often flexed their muscles for intimidation. Ganesh has encountered several of them as he climbed his way to the top.   
  
He also knew that they're the same men who took one look at Ganesh one day long ago in the streets and didn’t think he was anything to be feared. At only five foot-six with a slender build and a forgettable face, the don of the G-Company was a walking farce to organized crime itself.  
  
And now they sat across from him, filled to the brim with cruel amusement, still fixed on their opinion that Ganesh Gaitonde was not a rightful rival to their own boss, the Muslim capo Suleiman Isa who got out of India two years ago and has been content to monitor his business from afar since.  
  
It occurred to Ganesh then that these boys were still green behind the ears, because they had no idea that he was the reason Isa wasn’t even in Bombay anymore. And the fact that these benchods ended behind bars so early in their recruitment could only mean they were expendable to the S-Company.  
  
The three other men said nothing to Ganesh at the moment, but he could feel they watched him with the kind of hawk-like vigilance that revealed they had been around longer and therefore recognized him as someone they could at least show an ounce of begrudging respect to.  
  
As their younger recruits kept making rather vivid remarks about how Parulkar can just dock his ghanta in Ganesh's mouth even in the middle of a meal, one of them finally snapped and told them to shut up.  
  
“A bhai is a bhai, maderchods, even if you don’t work for him,” he warned them.   
  
Ganesh slowly raised his gaze to look at the face of his defender. He had sideburns and a hairy mole on the left side of his cheek. They briefly locked gazes as a moment of understanding passed between them. It was as solemn as two men could look at each other inside a place of worship like a temple or mosque.  
  
The ride was quiet again for the next five minutes.  
  
And that was when that the girl on Ganesh’s lap spoke.  
  
“WheRe dO bROken heaRts gO…”   
  
It turned out that she was singing along with the radio from the front seat as she swayed her pale legs in time of her singing. Dwarfed inside a raggedy pink sweater with the image of skull crying blood stitched across the chest, the girl who called herself ‘Del' had her arms wrapped around Ganesh's shoulders.   
  
She looked just like any little girl on a commute ride with her dad, uncaring of the rest of the world whilst she sang her tunes in broken intervals.  
  
The catch was that none of the other passengers could see her, let alone communicate with her.  
  
To Ganesh, she was an imaginary friend his mind conjured up two weeks ago during one of his baths. It could either be due to loneliness or madness, but whatever the case, he’s stuck with her now.  
  
He remembered the day she arrived. It was a Thursday; he knew because the meals were scheduled and they always have unseasoned daal and days-old chapati for lunch every Thursday. He could already smell the cuisine being prepared as they carried him all the way to the secluded washroom.  
  
Two guards lifted him from the cart and dumped him on the cold tiles before they left to wait outside. Parulkar had been kind enough to let him oversleep until noon, but that was only because of the severity of the beatings last night.  
  
Ganesh crawled on his elbows until he reached the stool located next to the only working office in the entire washroom. His feet had been profusely bleeding, and the blood mixed with the soap and water while he cleansed himself in an unhurried pace.  
  
With his back turned to the door as he stared mindlessly ahead, Ganesh poured water on his head using a bucket. He had slept for what felt like days and yet he was still tired. The ceaseless torture certainly didn’t help.  
  
It was while he was about to clean his bleeding soles that he felt someone behind him.  
  
Ganesh turned sharply to see who it was. He didn’t want any warranted surprises especially in prison.   
  
And there was this girl with chaotic tendrils of rainbow-colored hair just staring at him. She was very pale and had mismatched eyes, one green and the other blue.  
  
The girl was foreign in every way imaginable and foreign in a way he did not trust.  
  
Since he could not stand, he just swiveled his body from the stool while a hand cupped his scrotum. It was not for any reason of feigned modesty but for protection. Meanwhile, his other hand gripped the bucket, ready to use it on her if she did anything even remotely threatening.  
  
But all she said was “heRe, doGgGiee! coMmeE tO meE”  
  
She then knelt to her haunches and grabbed him by the ankle with a swiftness he did not calculate for. Ganesh was knocked out of balance immediately, falling out of the stool and almost breaking his hip. The sting of the impact vibrated through his body, and it made him clench his jaw and groan.  
  
He wanted to curse her aloud but his head is spinning. What he could only do was lift his hand still holding onto the bucket and slam it against the girl as soon as she climbed on top of him.   
  
But the bucket didn’t even hit her. Before his very eyes she dispersed as a trail of butterflies, and the next moment she was standing above him, her bare foot resting on his forehead.   
  
“badD doggIeEE!”  
  
And then he was dragged by the arms before falling and falling  
  
a n d . . .  
  
f a  
l l  
i n g  
.  
.  
.  
  
When Ganesh regained consciousness he realized he was inside a shack in the middle of the woods. He recognized it instantly. The fear was so palpable he could taste it at the back of his throat.  
  
No, his mind protested, none of this can be real.  
  
Instead of trying to find a way out of it, he simply pulled up the blankets he was swathed in and hid in them.   
  
And just when he thought things could not get any worse, that same girl was under the covers with him, staring and smiling before she tickled him and said, “gOOd dogiiiE! noWW let mE fEed yOU oNe tReAt!”  
  
The sudden jolt of the truck brought Ganesh back to the present. He turned his head and tried to see through any crack in this enclosed space just so he can learn if they were close by.  
  
The truck was being driven to the most nearby clinic for a standard medical check-up. He figured that his own was more than that, which was suspicious in itself already, particularly since his fellow passengers were all from the rival S-Company. It was only too easy to conclude this was a possible assassination, but why there had to be five of them was still a mystery.  
  
Personally, if this was his gang's hit, he would have only sent three boys; two to do the deed and one to clean up after. The fact that they have five here—with two of them being ignoramus maderchods—just struck him as overkill, if not an inefficient waste of time and energy.   
  
Was this a rogue hit then? He knew that some new recruits, in their rush to prove themselves, go after the don immediately as soon as he’s vulnerable. Is that what this is? But mole-on-the-left-cheek was clearly not a reckless recruit and so were the other older men with him who have not said a word since they climbed inside the truck.  
  
It was hard to describe how Ganesh felt at the moment. On one hand he was nervous, though it was the kind of anxiety that lent itself to gladness. After forty nights enduring physical stress and pain, Ganesh itched to fight someone—anyone—to prove he still was the kind of man you shouldn’t trifle with.  
  
“yOu’RE saD agAiNn doGz. DOn'T yOu wANT tO bE hapPPy foreVER? jOanN wAs in tHeE eNd. shE was a baBy dOvEe anD weE plaYed and PLaYed unTiL sHe wEnT eeeEek! tHenN i wEnTt WeEEee!”  
  
Ignoring Del, he leaned back against the iron encasing of the truck and stared at Isa's men, memorizing every detail of their person. The girl on his lap has begun to feel restless and was in the middle of reciting gibberish that wasn’t even in Hindi anymore when the driver hit the brakes.  
  
They heard the unmistakable bang of the barrel against the side of the vehicle as one of the guards said, “Pee break.”  
  
One by one they were all taken out , starting with Ganesh. The air outside was more humid than he remembered with the sun at its highest peak in the sky. Thick shrubbery and some low-hanging trees littered the pathway as a guard walked behind the shackled Ganesh. There was a good three feet distance between them, and he did not doubt for a second that there was a gun aimed on his back the entire time.  
  
Del, meanwhile was skipping next to him and would every so often move around him in a circle. He had learned to just walk through her, seeing as she did not seem to possess a solid form unless she willed it so. And, besides, having Del for company was better than no company at all. She has creeped up on Ganesh over the course of several days since their first meeting and has since turned herself into an inviolable part of his existence.  
  
He unzipped so he could relieve himself, all while his mind reeled back to that shack back in the woodlands.  
  
Finding a random girl in a bathroom at a men’s prison was bizarre enough but to be transported back into his childhood home which he vowed never to return to was disarming. All he could do was to stumble out of that mattress but not before he tried to choke the little bitch under the covers first.  
  
He couldn’t find her anymore. She was just gone. Breathing heavily, Ganesh looked around at the shack, haunted by the eerie familiarity of everything he thought he had forgotten; cracks in rain-sullied walls, dusty curtains, and the asthma-inducing perpetual incense smoke that clings to the pores. But, most of all, there was the distinct sound of a woman singing from behind a bedroom door.  
  
Ganesh hummed the wordless song under his breath as he crept closer and closer. Snippets of this song he knew will forever be lost in translation and yet the melody itself was eloquent. It was something whole, more whole than an actual person could ever be. And so he trailed after it, snatching each note like he was meant to devour it with his mouth until the song became a thread he can hold onto.  
  
He knew that it was only by reaching the end that he would see his mother again. In his dreams—back when he still dreamed of her—Ganesh as a little boy often would spy from a hammock and spot her sitting by a mirror in her desk, combing her black hair that reached past her elbows. She knew he was there and she would smile.  
  
Her left shoulder was exposed which she would then douse in powder and perfume. A finger traced that spot before the other digits wrapped around her bare throat, and she would massage the skin, delicately, and stare back at her reflection with the kind of sadness only old women have.  
  
Ganesh was posed behind the door of the same bedroom. He was no longer a child but a man grown, and very confused as to why he was brought here to the shack, gaping at his mother who was just a few feet away. This was a hallucination he simply would not stand for.  
  
Trembling hands carefully pushed the door open. A wind whooshed past as he did, and it was then that his mother turned.   
  
And then…  
  
And then…  
  
Ganesh jolted as something wet hits his face. Tears? But it was cold. He even choked as soon as it slips past his parted lips. Water, it was just water. He tried to open his eyes, blinking away the liquid from his lashes, and he saw the guards standing over him, shouting for him to get up, get the fuck up.  
  
Back at the bathroom again. Ganesh had collapsed and there was bruising at the back of his skull, yet it was mild compared to the other scope of his injuries before the fall.  
  
His feet, washed clean, still hurt. All he can do was to lean the weight of his upper torso against his elbows so that he can at least lift himself in a slightly bent sitting position. The guards were having none of it, but they had the common decency to carefully hold him up and guide him out of there.   
  
Afterwards a nurse came to wrap his feet in bandages, frowning the entire time. She was the same one who visited him for a total of nine times now. It was obvious in the way her shoulders slumped that she wasn’t happy to tend to a patient who gets beaten every other night anyway, which meant these bandages will be dirtied in no time.  
  
But there wouldn’t be another beating until three days later.  
  
Del hadn’t appeared again until after that beating started to occur. She was there for the most of it too, crouching by a corner in the cell. The entire time she stared, Parulkar and the other men did not see her or interact with her at all, and it was then that Ganesh realized she was made-up and that he was losing his mind.   
  
At first there was terror. And then relief.  
  
He was afraid that prison has truly broken him, hence the girl. But as Parulkar and his goons left him to lie on his back against the concrete floor, Ganesh was seized by a giddiness. He laughed. It was the kind of laughter that made him wheezy and teary-eyed, and just like that the pressure was gone. The fear became empowering, casting a net that caught him before he could drown in the sea.  
  
And Del laid beside him that night and she called him a good doggie and said that she would have fed him treats again, if only she could remember where she misplaced the chicken nuggets. She rambled on and on like that, and Ganesh gave him her ear. He allowed for the gibberish of her hurried yet melodious speech to consume him for that night and more nights that came.  
  
The girl never had to introduce herself. Ganesh just knew, like lightning, that she was called Del. It was the name he liked on his tongue but only ever spoken in his mind during their interactions.  
  
And she was his friend.  
  
That friend now hopped back onto his lap as soon as he was taken inside the truck again. It took ten minutes for everyone to get their turn for the pee break. Uneventful as it was, Ganesh at least had Del whom he wished he could touch the way she could touch him. He felt content, though only on the surface.  
  
The two maderchods were soon mocking him once more. They hardly changed their tune about Parulkar and the beatings, so enthralled they were about their assumptions that nobody else in that truck felt like breaking their hearts. Even Ganesh himself, although he supposed he could admire their commitment and the consistency of their taunting, no matter how erroneous.  
  
He could sense in the way the road curved that they must be close to the destination. Del had been napping quietly on his lap, with an arm behind his neck while her free hand was pressed against his chest. Ganesh still could not figure out what kind of hallucination she was supposed to be, but he liked that she kept calling him her doggie and he secretly hoped she would never leave.  
  
She stirred awake when the truck stopped for the second time. There was another bang of the barrel followed with, “We'll be back. Stay put.”  
  
Del giggled and clapped her hands together. He’s used to her reacting inappropriately by now, unable to follow a single rhyme or reason as if she was cut off from what is happening at present. She turned to Ganesh at once and whispered in a rather conspirational tone: “i fOunnd tHe tReatSs! i reMeMbeR nOww. do you thiNkK jOan would sTilL wanT tHeMm? WouLdD sheE haVe onE mORE rOOM foR hEr ArC??”  
  
Ganesh returned her enthusiasm with a wry smile. So, she found the treats. After two weeks when she first promised she will give him one. Better late than never, he supposed.  
  
The next thing he knew Del was pressing something against one of his hands. He looked down and was shocked to find that he was no longer shackled, and that there was a blade on his right hand. It was quite a fine instrument too; thin as an ice pick and just as sharp at the end. The handle was made of some type of leather, smooth and calming against his palm. He gripped it, looked at Del and before he could ask, she said:  
  
“enJoy yOuR cHicKen nuGGET, dogGo.”  
  
As soon as she vanished from his lap, Ganesh went to work. He fed.

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**[@HEISKAALASOORAJ](https://twitter.com/heiskaalasooraj) **

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